On the one hand, it’s amusing to see that suddenly “cultural appropriation” – in this case, a bunch of rhythmically-challenged Argentine leftist “Karens”

But I think this is a good thing. 

Hear me out.

Until the mid 1940s, Argentina was a wealthy first-world country, with a per capita GDP competitive with the US. 

Then, the “Argentine leftists” sold Argentine voters on “Rizz” and “Brat Vibes” with the Perons and a series of socialists, which gutted the economy and led to a series of coups and counter-coups, which also gutted the economy, which led to a war to restore pride that led to humiliating defeat that further gutted not only the economy but national pride, which led to further see-sawing back and forth, finally leading to a complete economic collapse 20 years ago, which has largely been met by further waves of center-to-far-left governments spending money they don’t have (or borrow from the IMF) to keep programs afloat at the expense of, well, everything.

So now the growups, led by Milei, are in charge, and they are showing the world the actual potential of the Argentine economy and people. 

So perhaps after his past 70-80 years, it’s best that Argentine leftists stick with club-footed cultural appropriation and dancing with all the rhythmic authority of Swedish disco dancers.  They cause less damage (artistic damage notwithstanding).

Walz comes back to Minnesota, looking like…

…well, he looks and sounds like hell quite frankly. “

“Take time to heal?”

That’s what Minnesota’s going to do after eight years, if it has the sense not to elect someone worse.

Among the things I’m thankful for is that life has evolved.

I was looking at some past Thansgiving pieces on this blog, and I found this one, written in 2002 – when this blog was nine months old.

And it took me back.

I moved from North Dakota to Minneapolis in October of 1985. It was a spur of the moment thing – in fact, it started with a drunken statement to a bunch of classmates at a college homecoming party two weeks earlier. It was five months after graduation, and they’d all come back to Jamestown (my hometown and college) with stories of their fun careers, fun cities, fun lives…

I was doing roofing and siding, wondering what the hell one did with an English degree. But after five or six gin and tonics, I found myself dancing with Monica Costello, and telling her “Yeah – I’m still here in Jamestown”. Really, she asked? “Yeah, but I’m moving”. Where, she asked. I thought about it for a second. “Minneapolis” seemed to be a place I could afford to get to. When, she asked. “Two weeks”, I blurted out without really thinking.

Damned if everyone didn’t remember that promise when we all sobered up. So – two weeks later, I loaded two duffel bags and a guitar into my ’73 Malibu, and I was off.

Six weeks later, it was Thanksgiving. I still had no job, I was broke and malnourished and cold. I’d had a few interviews, but no bites. I had dinner at a friend’s place. And on the way home, I drove downtown, and walked out onto the Central Avenue bridge, and looked out over the city in the dark. If you’ve never seen it, looking at downtown Minneapolis in the dark, when everything’s all lit up, is stunning; for someone just in off the prairie, it was like looking at Manhatten. I was cold, and scared out of my shorts about my short-term prospects – and for the first time, I felt strangely at home in this new city.

And every since then, Thanksgiving has seemed like the turning of the new year for me – the time when I reflect on the past year’s agonies and flubs and successes, and look forward to the next year. Much more so – for me anyway – than New Years’ Eve, which is more decompression from Christmas than anything.

I remember each Thanksgiving in the last 17 years – the giddiness of feeling like I was on the edge of something big in 1986, confident in my ability to pull it all together in ’87, shell-shocked and depressed and contemplating the implosion of my radio career in ’88, crazy in love in ’89, a harried but happy but broke newlywed in ’90, a new dad digging out of deep snowdrifts in ’91, broke and on the brink of eviction with two kids and another on the way in ’92, in a new house in ’93…wondering how long my marriage would last in ’98, being able to answer the question “not long at all” in ’99…

…and today. I sat for a while by the Cathedral of St. Paul, looking down Summit over downtown Saint Paul. The giddy, heady uncertainty of the thanksgivings of my first years as an adult, the throat-clutching terror of my divorce-era holidays, and the weary relief of my first thanksgivings as a divorced dad…well, little bits of all of them are still there. But there’s the emerging sense that my life really is mine, and that I’d better get on with it.

There’ve been so many good lists of things to be thankful for, from people as diverse as Michelle Malkin and Ted Nugent and Andrew Sullivan – and my own for that matter.

But I forgot one. I’m thankful to be here. Now. Doing what I’m doing, and with the chance to be doing the same thing – or better – next year.

Holy cow.  2002.   I can practialy feel the stomach acid from the most stressful part of my life.  I was about a year out of one of the ugliest times in my personal life, about a month away from the most grueling year of my vocational life.   Everything in life was a maelstrom of uncertainty, of finding a very uncertain way in a world where I felt like a passenger in a car driven by a drunk guy on the verge of blacking out.

Back then, in those days when blogging was something I did from 5AM until my kids woke up, this little project was my “me” time, yes – but also a little stake of sanity, where the things I wanted to happen, happened, and where a little part of my mind that’d been shut off for fifteen years, the wannabe pundit, got to come out and play for a bit. 

And for that, and everything since – two kids who grew up pretty good, two granddaughters who are the lights of more lives than they know, a talk show that pays me a lot more than money, a day job I genuinely enjoy working on every day, and more blessings than I’ve ever deserved – I’m grateful.

And the 2002 piece reminds me – it’s been a few years since I’ve done my Thanksgiving ritual of driving down to the Cathedral and looking out over the city.   I think I’ll do that today. 

NPR’s token Aztlani, Maria Hinojosa, yelling “SLAY, QUEEN GIRLBOSS!” as Mexico’s socialist female president briefly flexed on Trump’s border plans:

How it’s going:

Yep. The whole world witnessed it:

SCENE:  A “domestic” set in a media production room in DC.   Two Staffers, CHAD and JOSHUA, and two Harris staffers, COURTNEY and CLAUDE, are going over footage from an attempt to shoot a video.

COURTNEY:  OK, try take 45:

KAMALA HARRIS (on playback) “Hey, I’m Kamala Harris, and I spent the past week or two getting unburdened by what has been, raging on Jäger shots and weapons-grade weed, and trying to…

CLAUDE:  That’s not gonna work. 

COURTNEY:  What else we got?

JOSHUA:  Well, let’s just say this ad campaign is…um…

CHAD: Unburdened by a great take.

CLAUDE:  Well, I’m afraid that means the best take is…

COURTNEY:   63. 

CHAD:  Hard to say. She smelled like a three day bender the whole time.

COURTNEY:  (shrugs shoulders) Let’s try and see it again.

JOSHUA: (presses button)

The four wince visibly.

COURTNEY:  Seriously?   The best take?

JOSHUA:  Er…

CHAD:  Yep.  That’s as good as it gets.

CLAUDE:  We could try again when she’s sobered up?

COURTNEY:  OMG, she’s worse when she’s hung over. 

CLAUDE: (shakes head). What the hell.  Post it. 

CHAD: ( posting the video). Here comes the joy!

 And SCENE!

UPDATE:  I mean, look what they had to choose from?

It’s always the food photos with Governor Klink.

Only this time it’s not Pronto Pups:

Huh. For the past two years, we’ve been told Minnesota’s economy is boooooooming.

Now that a Republican is president-elect, the GOP will own Congress, and the DFL trifecta is dead…well, you see how this works.

So let’s translate this from MSM to English: “Governor who claimed MN economy was booming and promised to “reduce poverty 30%” by squandering a $19B surplus, now trying to get ahead of zooming poverty by spending >1% of what DFL constituents defrauded in “Feeding our Future”.

While this is good – and expected – news, I feel a little cheated.

Companies are ditching DEI because it’s bad for the bottom line; they can practice equality without flogging “equity”. 

But notice how it’s framed: “under pressure from conservative activists”. 

I mean, if you’re going to “blame” companies’ rediscovering economic and social sanity on people like me, and least call it “pouncing”, for fox’s sake.

The Democrat mayor of Denver, Mike Johnston, is suddenly a big fan of enumerated powers:

Glad they’re learning to love federalism and separation of powers. It’ll be a great precedent when some other Democrat tinpot tries to do a “Mandatory Gun Buyback”.

By the way – doesn’t this seem just a skosh insurrection-y?

I’m pondering renewing my subscription to Daily Wire.  

On the one hand, they’ve got good news coverage. 

On the other, the “membership” user experience needs work. 

So as part of my analysis process, I present:

Mitch Ranks the Daily Wire Podcasts.

Podcasts are rated in terms of

• Overall quality (subjective, judged by me), and
• Standard deviations from the mean likely with any given episode.  For those who don’t wrangle much with statistics (and I realize much of my audience does), standard deviations are a measure of consistency of statistics.  Example:  a sample of several ratings within 70% would have a very small standard deviation; a “90%” leaking in there would have a very large standard deviation.
  

OK.  Let’s get started (subscribe to the Daily Mitch for the…oh, wait.  I don’t do that. Yet). 

Ben Shapiro:

• Rating: 92%.
• Standard Deviation: 3%

Shapiro is just about always super solid. He rarely deviates from a very solid mean; his show on October 8 2023 was two standard deviations above (99%), and his review of “Barbie” was an extremely rare 20 standard deviations below.

Andrew Klavan

• Rating: NA
• Standard Deviation: NA

I can not work up the interest to listen to Klavan.  Maybe I should.  

Someday.  Promise. 

Probably.

Matt Walsh:

• Rating: 65%.
• Standard Deviation: 20%

The problem with Matt Walsh is, when he’s hot, he’s amazing (hence the high standard deviation). The problem with Matt Walsh is that when he really wants to make a point, and has a point to make, he makes the point in such a way as to make the point he has to make. As in, makes the point – the one he set out to make. And then makes that point – and makes the point again. Seriously – I once counted him re-making the same assertion ten times in 90 seconds.

Michael Knowles:

• Rating: 73%.
• Standard Deviation: 2%

Knowles is always Knowles. And by that, I mean he’s a 34 year old guy who lectures people about “growing old gracefully”.  He’s a very strident Roman Catholic who relates have been an atheist at Yale (all good), but goes on to live out the ecclesiastical version of the old saying “the most annoying New Yorkers are the ones that were born in Albany”;  he couldn’t exude “recent RomCat Convert” any harder if he did the show in Latin and squirted incense through the speakers.  But his insights about politics, especially the intersection of culture an politics, are almost always spot-on. 

He’s docked five points for constantly use of the term “weird sex stuff”, like he’s the world’s oldest awkward eight-grade boy. Seriously, taking a drink when Knowles says “Weird Sex Stuff” could be a more toxic drinking game than “Hundred Beer Club”. He gets three points back for getting “Barbie” very right for the same reasons I did.

Daily Wire Backstage

• Rating:  40%
• Standard Deviation: 15

Like The View, if it were done by frat bros with whom I largely agree. 

Back in college, I did a little acting.  

The highlight?  I played Henry II i “The Lion in Winter”.   And I had a blast. 

One part of the role involved using makeup to turn 20 year old Mitch into 55 year old Hank Deuce.  And since this was a small college theater, at a school that didn’t even offer a drama degre,  there weren’t a whole lot of extra people playing “Makeup Girl”.  

More than that, the professor, the late Patricia Lavin, was a formidable woman – she’d been the first female theatrical producer in LA back in the fifties and sixties, and had a long list of theatrical and film credits (she had done makeup work on the original “Planet of the Apes”, for one example) – who made sure that we learned how to do the nuts and bolts of theater. 

Including makeup. 

Which meant I, the very adolescent-macho Mitch, had to learn how to do his own makeup. 

And looking at the photos of 20 year old Mitch playing 55 year old Hank II, I actually looked a fair bit like I do today (albeit with a lot more hair). 

I thought about that when I saw this “comedian” talking about the Rep. McBride crisis:

So that’s what a woman is! Someone who can do makeup!

By that definition…

…well, do I even need to finish the sentence?

Today’s music list:

It’s time for your periodic reminder: free markets solve pretty much everything:

Even the picayune exception you’re about to throw into the conversation?

Yes.  If the market is free enough, and you give it enough time and the fundamentals of the economy are strong enough (we’re talking Argentina, here – a nation that’s been enervated by almost 20 years of near collapse)? 

Yes. That too. 

Carry on.

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

Thank you to everyone who Voted as Hard as They Could.  It paid off.  The election was not stolen. 

I have a parenthetical thought that doesn’t pertain to Joe. I don’t want to interrupt the flow, so I’ll hit that at the bottom of the post.

Back to Joe, who has the same question I had the day after the election:

But I still have a lingering question or two.  What happened to those 81 million 2020 Biden voters?  They didn’t go to Trump – he got fewer votes this time than last.  They didn’t stay home – Kamala got as many votes as Hillary.  

Did they ever exist?  Or is this graphic proof of a stolen election after all? 

My first principle is to never assume malice when stupidity and sloth are equally possible. The drop in Trump voters indicates that it’s at least partly the expiration of Covid-era voting rules that allowed people to submit ballots via their DoorDash driver, or by blinking three times during a Zoom meeting.

But that is a lot of disappeared Democrat voters. Which may speak just as well to the “sloth” thing.

OK.  Discuss.

Deferred Parenthetical Thought: And again, pinky swear, isn’t aimed at Joe – I get the point he’s going for (or at least the one he will go for when I’m done interrupting), but could we retire the phrase “Vote Harder?” Smug anarcho libertarians have beaten that one to death.

We get it. You’re splendidly above the muggles and our quaint delusions. 

HBO tells the Wokies to take a breather.

Insert the requisite epilogue: it’s not the end, it’s not even the beginning of the end, it might be the end of the beginning. Or perhaps more recently – the monster in the movie never dies the first time it’s killed.

But maybe the Disney lesson is sinking in?

“Expert on Misinformation” , in a case on “deep fakes”, uses a source that doesn’t exist…

…and might be AI generated:

At the behest of Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, Hancock recently submitted an affidavit supporting new legislation that bans the use of so-called “deep fake” technology to influence an election. The law is being challenged in federal court by a conservative YouTuber and Republican state Rep. Mary Franson of Alexandria for violating First Amendment free speech protections.

Hancock’s expert declaration in support of the deep fake law cites numerous academic works. But several of those sources do not appear to exist, and the lawyers challenging the law say they appear to have been made up by artificial intelligence software like ChatGPT.

For instance, the declaration cites a study titled “The Influence of Deepfake Videos on Political Attitudes and Behavior,” and says that it was published in the Journal of Information Technology & Politics in 2023. But no study by that name appears in that journal; academic databases don’t have any record of it existing; and the specific journal pages referenced contain two entirely different articles.

“The citation bears the hallmarks of being an artificial intelligence (AI) ‘hallucination,’ suggesting that at least the citation was generated by a large language model like ChatGPT,” attorneys for the plaintiffs write. “Plaintiffs do not know how this hallucination wound up in Hancock’s declaration, but it calls the entire document into question.”

And that’s not all

Separately, libertarian law professor Eugene Volokh found that another citation in Hancock’s declaration, to a study allegedly titled “Deepfakes and the Illusion of Authenticity: Cognitive Processes Behind Misinformation Acceptance,” does not appear to exist.

If the citations were generated by artificial intelligence software, it’s possible that other parts of Hancock’s 12-page declaration were as well. It’s unclear whether the non-existent citations were inserted by Hancock, an assistant, or some other party. Neither Hancock nor the Stanford Social Media Lab replied to repeated requests for comment. Nor did Ellison’s office.

“Bad AI Deep Fake” would explain a lot of Kamala Harris speeches, on the other hand.

Liek this “legal note” – aka “bit of emergency ass-covering from the legal department” – that Sunny Hostin was forced to read on The View lest Matt Gaetz sue them for slander.

The pain was visible.

And glorious. 

And I don’t think they’re done.

Berating voters didn’t work well for Royce White.

And not finishing thoughts didn’t do Giggles a lot of favors (you’ll have to hunker down and get to the “end” of the video to get the reference, and I can’t blame you if you don’t).

But…

…maybe this time it’ll work.

PS:  What is the “Right to be Happy?”

Are Brzezinsky and Scarborough trying to save their jobs?

Or are they trying to belatedly act like “journalists?”

It’s a coin toss as far as I can tell. 

But one things’ for sure – while good deeds might not go unpunished, failing to “denormalize” the “Literal Hitler” certainly won’t:

(Side question: Why is it that everyone who comes to leftist punditry after a career of yapping about grown men chasing balls around fields and courts inevitably such an idiot?)

But there are some – what do I say – “leaks” on the left:

But their purity police never sleep.

Watching today’s Left self-immolate is the perfect Christmas gift

To:  Brian Stelter, CNN
From:  MItch Berg, obstreporous peasant
Re:   Brendan Carr

Mr. Stelter,

You tweeted this about Brendan Carr, President-Elect Trump’s pick to head the FCC:

Just curious – what is it you think Carr is wrong about?

That is all.

…is that not only can you “appropriate” an indigenous culture to your rhetorical ends,  you can agglomerate indigenous cultures together into whatever custom mix you want to make whatever “point” you please.

For example, the term “Latinx”, which purports to consolidate widely disparate cultures (Puerto Rico has little in common with Central America, and less with Argentina and Chile).

Another example:  Er…

…this:

Perhaps the Maori of New Zealand might want to do something to nip this in the bud before white progressive women drag their culture over the shark with them?

Why are Democrats pushing so hard to bring Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia into the union as states?

The answer will become pretty clear in 2032.  People are voting red with their feet.  And Congress and the Electoral College are going to change. 

Texas and Florida appear likely to gain two seats apiece.  The Carolinas, Georgia, Arizona, Utah and Idaho are all contenders for another vote apiece. 

In the meantime, New York and California appear likely to lose 1-2 seats apiece.  Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota and West Virginia all appear to be contenders to lose seats.  

A swing of as many as (checking my math) nine electoral votes (and House Seats) from the Democrats to the GOP appears likely. 

The population of Puerto Rico has about the same as Utah, which has six electoral votes (presuming an honest census – which I do not, but for sake of this argument let’s say it is for bow).  DC?  Yep – three electoral votes.  

Kinda explains it all, doesn’t it?

Progressives – in this case, a guy who was telling us Joe Biden was stronger and more with it than Chuck Norris in his prime until two hours before Giggle defenestrated him – are not cool with RFK Junior running the DHHS:

So – RFK Jr. is driving his uncle’s car off the bridge and leaving the NIH and Medicaid to drown slowly?

I can’t be the only one to think that, can I?

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

Biden administration undercounting murders, revising history, setting the stage for a “murder surge” when Trump takes office and murders are honestly reported.

Joe Doakes

 

Let’s not think for a moment that Big Left is giving up after the November 5 landslide.

Governor Walz on Twitter, over the weekend:

Lt. Governor Flanagan, who uses her Native heritage like Walz uses plaid shirts:

That might explain them missing this bit of news:

The shift is striking because a Brookings Institution analysis published after the 2022 midterm elections found Native Americans still “solidly Democratic in their voting preferences.” Looking at data from an African American Research Collaborative poll with a nationally representative sample of Native American voters, the Brookings authors noted that in “House races across the country, Native Americans supported Democratic candidates at 56% relative to 40% of Native Americans who reported voting for Republicans.”

Seventeen counties with majority-Native American populations swung toward President-elect Donald Trump by ten or more percentage points. Just as with black and Hispanic voters, Native Americans had concerns that extended beyond the identity politics and left-wing virtue signaling of Democrats and the Kamala Harris campaign. Nationally, a whopping 65 percent of Native American voters went for Trump.

Apparently “stolen land declarations” aren’t as important as a decent economy and, perhaps, taming of the federal bureaucracy that’s sandbagged so much of Native American society.

Either way, I suspect if any more elections go like this, Prog politicians will stop “celebrating” Native American month, and you’ll start to see Sunny Hostin calling them “Native White Supremacists”.

To:  “Prez”, Dim Little Progressive Social Media Bulb
From:  Mitch Berg, obstreporous peasant who passed Econ 201
Re:  Not The “Own” You Think It Is

“Prez”,

Re your sentiment expressed over the weekend:

I mean, saving more money is good for you – might make you a conservative, eventually, actually.  

And unless you save that money in a coffee can in your closet, it’ll go to a bank, which’ll circulate the money around, further helping those who are participating in the economy to grow things. 

Not sure that’s quite the “own” you think it is. 

Even less so than dumping Twitter to join “BlueSky”, really.

That is all.